Top all-time · #6578
Aleksa Sarai
Personal blog · cyphar.com/blog · on HN as cypharsystemssecurity
Aleksa Sarai writes Cyphar's Blog, a personal blog at cyphar.com about systems and security. Since 2014, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Road to OCIv2 Images: What's Wrong with Tar?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-05-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters cite these posts on the ill-specified tar format, moving container images without a registry, container storage and rootless containers, and POSIX parsing versus typed interfaces.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The wild ramblings of Aleksa Sarai (aka Cyphar). A Free Software Developer, Security Researcher, GNU/Linux and Science Enthusiast.
Most-linked posts?
- Road to OCIv2 Images: What's Wrong with Tar?9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-01-21
What Hacker News says?
Nope. I run my own blog, which I implemented myself (using some nice Flask markdown thing as a base). https://www.cyphar.com/blog
Comment linking /blog
on “Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?”Submitted Getting into Linux Kernel Development as a story · 106 points
HN discussionI hope the image registry abstraction opens up the possibility to improve the storage and transfer of images without breaking backwards compatibility. See https://www.cyphar.com/blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar for why tar is not optimal.
Comment linking /blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar
on “Podman can transfer container images without a registry”Submitted Road to OCIv2 Images: What's Wrong with Tar? as a story · 99 points
HN discussion> Correct, there are no data diffs. DVC just stores blobs and you can GC the old ones Have you looked into using content-defined chunking (a-la restic or borgbackup) so that you get deduplication without the need to send around diffs? This is related to a problem that I'm working on solving in OCI (container) images[1]. [1]: https://www.cyphar.com/blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar
Comment linking /blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar
on “DVC – Open Source Machine Learning Version Control System”Submitted The Road to OCIv2 Images: What's Wrong with Tar? (2019) as a story · 80 points
HN discussionYes, except it's easy to debug a csv problem because it's generally text in some encoding you can hopefully identify without looking at specific byte offsets in a hex editor: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Tape_Archive#Identif... In fact, one of the biggest questions I've still yet to answer is whether Docker or OCI have ever clarified just which TAR format must be followed? As far as I can tell, it's a mix…
Comment linking /blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar
on “Tar is an ill-specified format (2015)”Submitted Debugging why ping was Broken in Docker Images as a story · 32 points
HN discussionHugo is pretty good. I've started using it for some project websites[1,2], though I don't use it for blogging. For my own website/blog, I wrote it from scratch using Flask[3]. [1]: https://rootlesscontaine.rs/ [2]: https://umo.ci/ [3]: https://www.cyphar.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What's a good static site generator to use for a blog in 2018?”Submitted The road to OCIv2 images: what's wrong with tar? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA bit of shameless self-promotion, I wrote a blog post some time ago which goes through the history of tar[1]. Tar definitely has evolved through the Unix wars, but I wouldn't say the final result is really that great. While we do tend to reinvent tools for reinvention's sake, I do think tar really does deserve a redesign based on modern constraints (rather than the constraints of tape archives). Zip archives are ma…
Comment linking /blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar
on “The cpio trailer problem (2018)”Submitted Road to OCIv2 Images: What's Wrong with Tar? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere's a lot going on in this article, from a lot of different ends. One of the big tensions (among many) that I'll focus on is rootless containers. Frankly it's a bit silly to think containers are useful when you need root on every system to use them- do people on academic systems simply not get the ability to use containers? As we move towards multi-tenant, "hyper-converged" systems (things running lots of worklo…
Comment linking /blog/post/rootless-containers-with-runc
on “Containers and Storage: Why We Aren’t There Yet”Submitted Why Privacy is not only for the Guilty as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSorry if I came off as "excited" -- the main thing I'm not clear on is the framing of M x N with respect to parsing. From my post: I also claim that parsing is an O(M + N) problem, while types can create O(M × N) problems — and often do. So the key point is that writing M + N amounts of code is tractable, but M x N is not. This was captured in the linked "Unix vs. Google" video as "coding the perimeter" vs. "coding…
Comment linking /blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar
on “It's time to get the Posix elephant off our necks”Submitted The Road to OCIv2 Images: What's Wrong with Tar? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making a Simple Scheduler for the Arduino as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
